Here In My Car, I'm As Safe As Can Be ...

Son et lumière, Strasbourg, Juillet 2021

Oh well, the Christmas feast has been duly digested and so, if I may judge from the fact that my upper left arm is no longer swollen and painful, has the COVID booster shot.

For us it was foie gras, turkey and chipolatas and roast spud and parsnip purée and sprouts and baked ham and godnose what else: how was it for you? At least the sun was out in these here parts, and 15° is a bloody sight more than we could have realistically hoped for ...

The saga of little Lilibeth continues. For those of you who came in late and can't be arsed reading the Cliffs Notes version, last we saw her she was up on the hoist in Philippe's garage - having had her engine removed, the gearbox unmounted and subjected to his tender ministrations, everything stuck back together and back into her body - with an unconnected lead direct from the battery to the starter motor.

Having fixed that little problem and having got the transaxles and brand-new shocks back in place it seemed like a Good Idea - at the time - to make sure that all was in proper working order: sadly, this turned out not to be the case. For lo! there was a whinge in the transmission, which is not exactly a good thing.

But having been through all this before we just unhooked the gearbox from the engine, leaving this last in place, and Philippe once again proceeded to pound his head against a wall working out how to realign the differential ...

With only a few square cm of missing skin and the odd ding in my (luckily rather thick) skull we managed to get the gearbox back in place and tidied up a few bits and pieces - like sticking hideously expensive oil into the box, installing the fanbelt that drives the water pump and radiator fan, stuff like that - and then, of course, it was time to start her again.

 

I should be so lucky. Turn the key, the solenoid goes "clunk!" in a very smug way, and nothing happens. It happens very suddenly, mind you. So check the battery voltage: 11V, not so good, on the charger and we'll see tomorrow ...

I have heard that one of the definitions of insanity is repeating the same sequence time after time and still expecting that this time around things will turn out differently: doesn't happen. "Perhaps" said Philippe "la batterie is morte?". Fair enough, it dated from 2014 and it had been a rather chilly few months ...

So order a new battery, hurry up and wait. As one does. Much to my surprise it turned up two days later so off I trotted, hooked it up, and oh dear! same old thing. But this brand new battery is only at 10.5V ... WTF? With feeling. Drag the charger back out ...

You were expecting a happy ending? Battery at 14.2V, start, clunk, 10.5V ... even to my befuzzled mind, something is not right here.

When insanity has failed you, you've few other options but the relentless application of logic, belated though this may be. So what was the last thing that changed? Fan-belt. OK, remove the sucker. Gosh, the motor turns over!

Now it is time to work out why, so remove the water pump and radiator fan assembly (luckily, this is held on to the engine block by but three bolts, only one of which is totally inaccessible if you don't have the right sized/shaped hands) and take a look at that: at which point it becomes clear that at some time in its past the metal shrouding around the fan has been seriously mugged - or fell down the stairs at the police station - and in its current shape is preventing the fan from turning.

My personal opinion is that it hadn't turned for years - given the state of the old fan belt, much of which we found semi-digested in the radiator ...

 

Cue a few hours bashing the shroud into some semblance of an actual circle - there's still a stiff point when it turns which probably means I should order new bearings and seals for the damn thing, but that's pretty straightforward. Stuff's in stock, only have to wait another week - anyway, that can be a problem for another time, because now it becomes apparent that the gearbox is pissing oil.

Fuckery! I am so not going to take that bloody gearbox out yet again: so unbolt the side cover (for once, right-hand side and more or less accessible except for two bolts which you can't really get at with a standard spanner and the head of one has been knackered at some time in its life) and pull that off insofar as possible to discover that the new gasket is not in the best of shape.

(Getting to this point, I will remind you, has already involved removing the gear selector and the right-hand mounting bracket from the gearbox so that it can be dropped low enough to get one's hands in there.)

 

Whatever, oil is now dripping out into a bac and in the not too distant future there will be silicon mastic on each side of the gasket and everything will go back into its appointed place and all will be well with the world, but I now see why it is that mechanics are, as a general rule, cynical bastards. Who may, let it be admitted, occasionally overcharge their clients to some degree, but I can totes understand this.

I am still hoping to be able to take her for a spin in January: hell, what else could possibly go wrong?

(Actually, I know the answer to that one. Once she is operational I shall still have to give Philippe a hand with his 2CV, which currently has her guts spilled across the garage floor, conveniently blocking the door.)

I think I mentioned a little while ago that I was planning a wine run to pick up some Uby? I decided to give myself a birthday treat and booked a room in a chateau-hotel about 3km from the winery, and set boldly off for the Gers ...

It's been a bloody long time since I took that road - maybe twenty years or so - so I was surprised to find it so familiar. But this time I boldly drove into the centre of Auch when it came time for lunch: do you know that that endangered species, the free car park, still ekes out a precarious existence there?

No prizes for guessing what I had: foie gras and a couple of glasses of a rather excellent Gascon white, walked some of it off (partly by heading back down the monumental staircase that gets you up to the old town) and carried on to Cazaubon and my rendez-vous with wine.

I'm glad I did that, even if - after a pleasant dégustation - I wound up with four crates of wine and a few bottles of Armagnac in Sarah's boot before finding the hotel.

 

Which was, as you may notice, very nice indeed but be warned, October can be a beautiful month but you still run the risk, in a chateau, of having a bit of frost inside the windowpanes first thing in the morning - just saying.

Dinner, incidentally, was excellent: foie gras (what else?) followed by roast quail in a red wine sauce with muscat grapes, then a rather sumptuous dessert. Sadly I don't, as a general rule, bring my phone to the table or I'd have snapped the label on the bottle of red they served me (to die for) and wound up coming back with more booze than even I'd planned on.

And as it seems to be a tradition, or an ancient charter or something, for me to rant at least once, can someone please tell me why it is that Goofle has form taking a perfectly usable product and then "improving" it until it is no longer so? Even Microsoft does it the right way round. Eventually.

It's just that the Blogger interface has become complete shite. Back in the day you could click on "insert image", select a dozen files to be uploaded and, when done, select just the one you wanted to go in such and such a place. The next time you tried, you would see the thumbnails of the files you'd just uploaded, pick the one you wanted, rinse and repeat.

These days? Doesn't work. To see the newly uploaded photos you have to select "from this blog" and then scroll down through 2000-odd photos ...

Text justification is crap - even more so than once it was - but my fave fuck-up is that when you wish to edit a post it will automatically go into "HTML view" mode. Despite your having last used it in "compose" mode.

I could live with that, the problem is that when you select "compose" mode from the menu a smug little message pops up to say something along the lines of "Your html code is invalid! You may lose content. Continue?". So basically what we have here is an editor that can't even re-ingest the html code that it itself generated. Really gives you faith, doesn't it.

Whatever, I'm going to drown my sorrows in a glass of Knut Hansen gin, from Hamburg. If ever you spot some, buy it: you'll thank me later.

May Maggots Eat Their Living Brains ...

 ... yes, as you've probably worked out

 a) Microsoft have screwed me about again, and

 b) Margo bought a Hewlett-Packard printer a few years back.

Sadly, there is some shite which requires me to run Windoze, so for about a week I had to boot the trusty laptop up under Windows 10. Which required leaving it for a few hours as it downloaded accumulated updates and installed them ... then, one day up in Strasbourg, it decided to spend all day downloading some crap "quality of life" update that would bring me massive satisfaction with the inclusion of Paint 3D! (as if) and then, around 5pm, chose to install this huge pack.

 

Which was hideously inconvenient but luckily after half an hour or so it rebooted - as it will - and I took the opportunity to turn it off and hie me back to the hotel, where I let it go about its business whilst I ate ... and when I got back to the room after a couple of hours it had got up to 60% done and then, in front of my eyes, displayed the rather alarming message "Windows is trying to recover your previous installation ...": this is not the sort of thing you really need. Especially when far from the office.

Luckily for me it seemed to succeed, so I tried in every way known to man to turn off automatic updating: this is not, it seems, possible with Windows 10 Home, albeit only mind-bogglingly difficult with the other versions. But despite my best efforts a few days later it tried to reinstall the borked update ... now, when I have to boot Windows I have Wifi disabled and I unplug the Ethernet cable. I suppose I could give the thing a static IP address and set up the router firewall to ban all incoming/outgoing traffic for that address, but that seems overkill.

And as for the printer, sometime last year it decided to download a firmware update that basically bans the use of any but HP toner cartridges. Which Margo discovered when she bought some rather cheaper-than-HP "compatible" cartridges, and the beast threw a hissy-fit. She complained to the toner company who sent out replacements only to have the same thing happen: so I went goofling, as one will, and found (in addition to a large number of disgruntled ex-HP customers) a tool that should let one downgrade the firmware.

It started off promisingly enough, with first of all "Erasing" and then "Programming..." but of course things that seem too good to be true usually are not, in fact, true and this turned out to be the case because the bugger reset halfway through the process and still obstinately refuses to recognise the new cartridges. According to various forae there should be an option in one of the setup menus to enable firmware updates, but of course this does not exist on this particular printer ... also, it now comes up with a "Fatal Error 200" on random occasions, and still won't print.

So we have a borked printer, two sets of colour cartridges, and slightly elevated blood pressure - which I'm going to do something about in the immediate future. Just remember, people - never, EVAH, buy an HP printer. Call me old-fashioned if you will, but when I buy a bit of consumer electronics I do rather expect it to belong to me ...

 

(Just as an aside, it's now reposing at the local tip where it can contemplate the errors of its ways. Rather spitefully, I actually feel good about that.)

In other news, little Lilibeth looks a bit sad just now, up on the big hydraulic hoist in Philippe's garage with nothing in her rear end, what with the engine sitting on the floor on a pile of sawdust and the gearbox and differential disassembled on a couple of workbenches. Still, a little jaunt to Carcassonne got me three of the four bearings for the gearbox, and as it turns out the front bearing on the main shaft - which is rather difficult to find - is in good nick and doesn't actually need replacing, which is kind of convenient.

And I've found online and duly ordered the synchro slider, the synchro ring, the two springs that go with it, the spie joint for the driveshaft and a full set of gaskets (not to mention rear shock absorbers and a few other bits and pieces): all of these things should arrive before the end of the month so with any luck she'll be in running order by October. That would be rather nice ... next project, an Alfa Spider, anyone?

 

Ah well, there's many a slip twixt cup and lip, and the Red Guy is always there ready and waiting to throw up on my eiderdown ... looks like this is going to be a Christmas/end-of-year missive rather than the one I'd planned for somewhat earlier. Never mind.

Lilibeth is still up on the hoist: once Philippe had redone the gearbox we bolted that back onto the engine, stuck that back into its compartment, lost some skin putting the transaxles and shocks back where they belong, hooked up all the various cables for accelerator, clutch, choke ... and couldn't get her to start. The starter motor engaged, but refused to turn.

Fortunately the RTA has the full wiring diagram and it didn't take me too long to realise that we'd omitted the basic step of connecting the battery lead to the starter ... in my defence, let it be said that the lead was actually hanging hidden behind the radiator fan.

Having corrected this basic but totally understandable error she started on the second go - not so bad, all things considered - and the gearbox works perfectly: sadly there was an - unusual - noise from the diff so ...

 

... as it happens you can in fact, if you're correctly equipped, uncouple the gearbox from the motor and then just drop the former out from underneath. Which is what we did. I am assured that adjusting the differential on an 850 is a complete pain in the arse which, unless you happen to have the proprietary (and long-since unavailable) Fiat tool for the job, best recalls the tedious process of successive approximation for N iterations (where N is a number too large for comfort) which I had to do for maths, a long time ago. (Luckily, these days we have Excel and the like to do such shit for us.)

Whatever, it's done, she can be put back together again: sadly it's about 8° in the garage and although the entire job should take no more than a morning that's assuming that your tiny hands are not constantly frozen. So she can wait for a spell of warmer weather.

In other news, it would appear that our bar is cursed: all those that take it over seemed doomed to ... well, doom, I suppose. Let's be clear, I am sufficiently French by now to feel that there's absolutely nothing wrong with having an affair - come to that, why stop with just one, if you happen to enjoy it?

But even (maybe especially) in France there are rules for this sort of thing, and the first (and possibly only) rule is that You. Are. Discreet.

So if Sandra decides she wants to shag Fabrice (the "why" escapes me, I can only assume that he's a really exceptional lover, because to all appearances he nicked his nose from a bust of Julius Caesar and his voice from one of the cartoon extras in Roger Rabbit) then that's none of my business: not only do I not care, I don't want to know.

Unfortunately "not knowing" did not seem to be an option, and soon enough a number of people did know, and then of course Eric found out, which led to a scene ... neither the ambiance, nor the clientèle, are what they were: I might have to fall back to Fontcouverte.

Still, it's a shame. Godnose I'd not have expected anything better of the fawning little tit, but I'd thought Sandra was rather smarter than that. It would seem that I was mistaken.

On the bright side, it's given the village something to talk about for the next six months at least, so all the vicious old biddies who like to regret the lamentable lack of moral fibre in the yoof of today will be able to die with smiles on their faces.

Whatever: it has not escaped my notice that the new year is approaching. The end of 2019 was very bad as far as I was concerned, 2020 was a completely shite year that's best forgotten, and 2021 has been an admittedly mitigated disaster.

 

So here's hoping that 2022 will be a little brighter. Mind how you go, now.